El Greco

Some stats for you. 25 days, 4378kms, 22 tanks of fuel, 3 nights in a hotel room, 1 day at the beach swimming – today!, 1 flat tyre (day one in Cornwall and the only time Sal has driven) and a million Germans and even more Dutch and what seems like three weeks of constant rain.
We’re writing this sitting out side in the warm sunshine next to the van on wifi, Sal chopping some veg for dinner and listening to Faithless on the ipod. We are at a large camp site directly across from the beach about an hour north of Valencia. Today has really been day1 of the beach trip side of things and kicking off the start of the Med.
Since we last wrote we spent a day at Europe’s largest and most important wetlands on the Golf of Cadiz called Parque Nacional de Donana, where pink flamingos fly north from Africa and wetland horse’s roam free. A really random town called El Ricio where the roads are sand, horse stalls out the front of each, deserted, house and the only thing missing was tumble weed.

We then spent two days in Granada, a beautiful town with its Islamic jewel the Alhambra backed by even more spectacular snow-capped mountains, the Sierra Nevada’s.
driving past fields and fields of olive trees
The view from Alhambra overlooking Granada

Gorgeous gardens in Alhambra

Before we left the Granada area we went for a quick hike in the Sierras...in the rain.
A long drive north to Toledo. A spectacular looking town set high around the river Rio Tajo where we spent a night getting to know the view, an older English couple, the feeling of ripped jeans from climbing trees in the dark to find out where some party tunes were coming from and a nasty hangover the next morning.
Looking over Toledo

Onwards to Madrid…in the rain. We saw some fantastic storm clouds among other things. We stayed a night in what was supposed to be the ‘cool/hip/happening’ part of town but turned out to be the most ‘dodgy, prostitute, pimps and raging gays’ part of town. Maybe that’s whats hip these days? We wouldn’t know we’ve spent too much time with old people in caravans in the past few weeks. We don’t really rate Madrid high on our list of big cities. The pimps and hoes, rain, no parking, riot police everywhere (from riots the day before – on our hotel street) and a not a great overall vibe.

We've seen about 20 of these so far on our travels through Spain. This one was the coolest one we've seen, just outside of Madrid.

We planned on driving the whole way to Valencia but decided to stop over a night in a beautiful pine forest campsite and another world heritage town called Cuenca where there are ‘hanging’ houses and massive gorges. Not as amazing as the people at the local tourist office told us it would be but beautiful all the same.

Lac looking over the gorgeous gorge

The 'hanging houses'
Valencia next stop. It seemed a long drive and hot and we just wanted to get to the beach so we did our own little driving tour of the town. Took a few snaps shots of the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias (incredible!) and kept going. The mood in the trusty transit changed almost instantly as we drove down the hills towards the coast, the weather was warm, sunny, therapeutic, wonderful!

We've seen sooooo many fields of poppies, sunflowers and days and days of olive trees.

And now here we are! We spent the day at the beach with a little storm interval at lunch, chilling out, soaking up the rays like true Europeans (eurotrash) (oops!) getting some much needed R&R before we head off to Barcelona tomorrow for five days.

What we are really loving about this trip is the freedom!